Can You Develop iPad Apps on an iPad?

cheesesteak

Can you develop apps for the iPad on an iPad? I've looked at the Apple site and it seems like you need a Mac to do development work for the iPad. I have no intention of buying a Mac and it looks like PC emulators aren't supported. I don't have any grandiose design plans for an app. I'd probably get bored soon after my "Hello World" program. It just seems odd to me that there don't seem to be any iPad code compilers or screen design tools available for the iPad. Is the iPad processor still not powerful enough to do development work on using the iOS SDK? Just wondering.

Keebo

There are a few apps available. I use Codea to write programs on my iPad that I can run immediately on my iPad. However, a Apple Developers License and a Macintosh is required legally to submit an app to the app store. There are a number of user apps on the app store that seem somewhat successful for an indie developer.

Codea uses the Lua programming language which is easy enough to learn. The developer continues to enhance the app and has a very helpful group of users on their forum. The music aspect of the app has been quite rudimentary but that looks to change in an upcoming update.

dwarman

+++ on Codea. Love it. Want them to put in CoreMidi API tho. Has some audio generation capabilities, for game sound effects. Cargo Bots is an App Store game (free) totally developed in Codea, then run through a tool on a Mac to wrap it up for the store. Its source code comes with Codea.

Keebo

@dwarman, glad to see another Codea user here. Do you frequent their forum and if so what user name do you go by (if you feel comfortable saying here). I stop by there almost daily gathering useful tips and code snippets so freely shared but rarely post.

There have been several users request MIDI, OSC, easily useable audio, etc. since I purchased Codea over a year ago and has been a little slow to gain the developers attention. I think with iOS 7 coming up they are going to introduce something to get our feet wet. To what degree I don't know as I'm not a beta tester.

dwarman

I've been away from it for a while, but Air Code looks interesting. Last thing I did was work on porting both between Codea and Love2D using iExplore (which will mount the iPad as a disk drive so scripts can manipulate stuff). Building a mesh topology editor to produce JSON definition files for another Lua project.

Same name but post rarely.

JMSexton

I have Codea also. This conversation made me remember this app, it looks neat and the concept is great. I haven't gotten it yet so not sure if it fulfills its goal but check it out

http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=197214

CrisLamper

I did not use Codea a long time, but i started with it. If you want to develop a quality app for iPad you should learn develop languages very well. And I select to order ipad application development services for my busines.

raz

There's also Pythonista if you speak Python.

[Deleted User]

Regarding the lack of Core MIDI support in both Codea and Pythonista...

I just discovered that Mobmuplat can work as an OSC server. So, all you need is a PD patch, that will convert incoming OSC messages to MIDI, and Lua or Python code, that will pack and send those OSC messages via UDP

I'm gonna give it a try with Pythonista

neinneinnein

Made a feature request for MIDI support in Codea about 3 years ago.

Earsinn

Not suited for midi/audio probably, but for text-manipulation, I would suggest Editorial. It is a markdown-editor with a python-engine. Absolutely brilliant for automating text-tasks. It's from the same developer, who made pythonista.

[Deleted User]

What's the best one overall for creating music apps? In the 'Codea: Amazing Things' vid there's a keyboard app at the end, and in the new one (Codea - Make Games on Your iPad) a basic sequencer. Is it possible to put together a simple music app with Codea or would you need to hack into it's code via something like Pythonista?

[Deleted User]

@monzo said:
What's the best one overall for creating music apps?

The best one is Xcode + ObjC/Swift

Codea and Pythonista are very good for scripting and prototyping, maybe for developing some simple apps, but definitely not good enough for creating music apps.

[Deleted User]

Looks like OSC is working fine in Pythonista if you import and use the following module: https://github.com/ptone/pyosc

Managed to make it control Ableton Live via wifi Gonna try to code my own midi sequencer

TGiG

Go, @yug, go, go, go!

[Deleted User]

@yug said:
Codea and Pythonista are very good for scripting and prototyping, maybe for developing some simple apps, but definitely not good enough for creating music apps.

Thanks, I've been going through some Xcode tutorials recently - I'll carry on with that one

MobileMusic

play.js + React Native